Not Another Gendered or Raced Women's Road Movie!
In both films, the filmmakers embark on journeys to discover a kind of shared identity through individuals with two things in common: their name, and their disposition. For Shelton, women with her name are also victims of abuse. Similarly, subjects Lee speaks to come up with hoards of information leading back into the filmmaker’s assumption that all Grace Lees are the same—they are Korean, and practice piano a lot. Both instances show how these films are gendered and raced. Both filmmakers set out to find a true identity, but instead rely on stereotypes that continue to marginalize women. Classifying a woman as a victim of violence or Korean says little about that woman, but yet a single attribute is used in both films to define not just one person, but a plethora of them, all sharing the same name. While it may be an interesting concept to go out and find all these people with the same name, to throw them all together in a homogenized manner for the sake of neatness disallows any relevatory points from emerging from either film.
Here's activist Grace Lee Boggs in an interview: